MedAssist: LLM-Empowered Medical Assistant for Assisting the Scrutinization and Comprehension of Electronic Health Records.

Abstract

Efficiently comprehending diagnosis and treatment plans remains a significant challenge for both medical professionals and patients, particularly when dealing with rare or newly emerging diseases and specific combinations of comorbidities. We present MedAssist, a large language model (LLM)-empowered medical assistant designed to support the scrutinization and comprehension of electronic health records (EHRs). MedAssist leverages two key components: <i>medical knowledge retrieval</i>, which retrieves the latest and most comprehensive medical knowledge snippets from the web, and <i>data retrieval</i>, which extracts diagnosis and treatment plans for similar patients from existing EHR databases. By integrating these capabilities into user-friendly interfaces, MedAssist bridges critical gaps in medical knowledge accessibility and understanding, and advances patient care in realistic clinical scenarios.